Military aircraft used to dispense bombs, rockets and other stores in flight usually include racks located beneath the wings and fuselage designed to release the stores upon command. Typical racks are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,784,132 by NEWELL wherein the store retaining hooks are located inboard from sway bracing mechanisms which usually consist of spring-loaded plungers positioned to engage the surfaces of the loaded store. In some embodiments wedges are used to assure that the sway brace remains in proper position during high-G maneuvers of the aircraft. A typical rack having the hooks outboard of the sway braces is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,954,233 by HASQUENOPH, et al.
The time required to refuel and rearm a combat aircraft including the loading of stores on pylons becomes critical under many combat conditions. Therefore, it is desirable that a store rack not only operate properly when releasing a store but that the rack is easy to reload. For this reason racks with automatic sway bracing such as shown in the HASQUENOPH, et al patent have been developed. Normally, such devices require opening and closing of the hooks to hold the bombs or stores and in some instances manual positioning and fitting of the sway braces or some other adjustment when the rack is required to accommodate a store having a different support ring dimension than the previous store loaded onto the rack. If the new store has a different lug span, the rack itself must be changed. Racks with sway braces actuated by wedges which apparently engage as the hook adjacent the wedge closes are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,008,645 by HERBERT and U.S. Pat. No. 4,183,480 by JAKUBOWSKI which is assigned to the same assignee as the instant patent. Both of these references provide for biasing the wedges so as to automatically engage the sway braces. However, testing of the rack of reference 2 in a simulated flight environment while mounted on a wing structure and with the store attached caused a condition to occur within the rack which made manual removal of the store either very difficult or impossible. Further development test indicated that vibratory loads caused the wedges to load and unload in alternate fashion while the wedge was unloaded the biasing spring 146 caused the wedge to advance in the direction to increase the load imposed by the sway brace on the store. Obviously, the greater the mass of the store or the G-load caused by the environment, the greater the preload sway brace imposed against the store. The rack was particularly sensitive to a torsional vibration about the longitudinal axis of the store.
With this background, it is apparent that there has been a need to provide a store carrier which includes hooks at different spans, is easy to load and unload, and which can automatically brace stores of various sizes against lateral sway and prevent overload under vibratory loads. Such a device would shorten the time required for the loading thereof while at the same time would be able to receive a new store with either a 14 or 30 inch lug span. A 14 or 30 inch lug span has become standard in most western countries. At the same time, the device must be able to accommodate excessive loads applied to the hooks due to high G-maneuvers and the reaction forces from the sway braces.